The white rain came

by Jacques Jean Ferrat [Pseudonym of Sam Merwin, Jr.]

Do you remember Jacques Jean Ferrat’s NIGHTMARE TOWER ? We’re sure you do if we had the privilege of numbering you among our earliest readers, for the story appeared in the very first issue of FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, and its swift, unusual plot and brilliant characterization were so astonishingly vital as to make it quite unforgettable. Since then demands for a sequel have been so insistent that when Mr. Ferrat walked into our office with this exciting lead novelette in his briefcase our joy was unconfined.

=There was need on Mars for folly half sublime and a man’s delight in recklessness. But a woman’s steadfast gifts were needed more.=

Had Lynne Fenlay been less proud, she would have wept, openly and unashamedly. Standing before the altar, directly in back of her twin, Revere Fenlay, and his bride, Lao Mei-O’Connell, she felt acutely homesick for Earth. Intellectually, of course, she understood and accepted the need for multiple marriages on Mars. But she could not evade a sense of emotional outrage at the assembly-line method of marriage which circumstances had made mandatory on the alien planet that was now her home.

The marrying officer, who trebled in brass as a circuit judge and an electronics expert on the thinly settled Red Planet, wore only a shabby-looking, round-cornered apron. Although it bore the twin-worlds insignia, emblem of his high office, it was tucked with a careless lack of dignity into the top of his wellworn clout, and everyone could see that one of the tie-strings was missing.

A bald-headed little man with an incipient paunch and knobby knees, he intoned the brief ceremony from rote, never glancing either at the book in his right hand, or at the faces of the four couples standing directly in front of him.

“...and to be mutually faithful during the period of enforced separation, to work honorably for one another and for the planet upon their reunion, to provide a home for the sons and daughters of their union. For these purposes, by the virtue of the power embodied in my....”

He mumbled on, running the words together in his haste to conclude the ceremony which would unite the four couples from far Barkutburg, and enable him to get on with the marriages from New Walla Walla, Cathayville, Zuleika and the other major settlements of Mars. A few kilometers away, a spaceship was waiting to take the brides of the Red Planet home to Earth to bear their children--a function which was not possible of fulfillment in the light gravity of Mars.

All of the brides were pregnant. In tacit accordance with the dictates of expediency in frontier settlements all through man’s history on Earth and, more lately, on Mars, a marriage was not a marriage until offspring were on the way. When a couple decided to mate, it was only necessary for them to sign a register and share quarters as provisional husband and wife. The arrangement would remain in force as long as it gave satisfaction to both parties. If it failed divorce became merely a matter of signing another registry.

But once a child had been conceived, casualness vanished, for the bringing of Martian children back to Mars was a major factor in the effort to populate the planet. Such children were its hope, its future, against the time when man should have conquered his new environment, and child-bearing no longer necessitated a hasty return to Earth.

For the rest, Mars was populated by expert technicians, officials and the halves of genetically induced identical twins--of which Lynne and Revere Fenlay were unusually gifted examples. The purpose of this plan was to give the new planet Earth’s hereditary best without stripping the home planet of its most promising young folk. One twin, conditioned for Earth, stayed at home--the other, carefully trained from infancy to endure and triumph over the hardships of life on the Red Planet, went to Mars.

Lynne was one of the few Earth-trained twins ever sent to Mars to join her brother. Her telepathic genius, of a range and sensitivity almost unknown on the home planet, with its dense atmosphere and other inhibiting factors, had been urgently needed in a desperate crisis when the telepathic lateral communications of Mars had been threatened with destruction by strange electronically-revivified survivals of the original Martians. She had been needed, and once the crisis had been conquered, she had stayed on to aid in new telepathic research. She had stayed on, and now--she was rebellious and homesick.

There was a gaunt, stripped-down, machine-shop look to the great hall. In New Samarkand, the planetary capital where the ceremonies were being conducted, the established ritual never varied. The marrying officer stood on a low platform, and at his back rose a portable altar surmounted by the symbol of universal faith. This consisted of a cross for Christianity, in a circle representing the “wheel of life” religions, and outside its circumference smaller crosses with their ends bent at right angles to represent the symbol of still older faiths.

It had been battered by constant usage, and one of the tips was rudely broken off. Recalling the symbolic beauty of the ritual that still enhanced marriage ceremonies on Earth, and contrasting it with the crude matter-of-factness of Martian multiple weddings Lynne wished, and not for the first time, that she had not permitted Rolf Marcein to talk her into coming to Mars.

She cast a quick sidelong glance at Rolf. He stood almost directly behind the second bride, a lean, sun-bronzed figure towering over the other guests, a sensually suggestive smile on his lips which was anything but reassuring. He winked as he returned her glance. Even less reassuring was her certain knowledge that Rolf was drunk. The monthly, multiple marriages on Mars accompanied as they were by the prospects of incipient parentage and immediate long separation, had degenerated into one big farewell carnival.

This one, as far as Lynne was concerned, had begun three Martian days earlier when the settlers of the Barkutburg station--the residence of Lao, Revere and, until recently, of Lynne--had thrown a thirty-six hour wingding for the departing bride. Lynne had attended, of course, out of devotion to her twin and his wife. But since her neuro-emotional makeup was too fine-tuned to enable her to enjoy alcohol in quantity, she had been something of a spectre at the feast.

The journey to New Samarkand had been a brief interlude between binges, followed by another revel on the eve of the official wedding. This time, Rolf had been on hand and, under his prompting, Lynne had taken a little too much and was suffering the inevitable after-effects. Rolf, apparently, was just getting up a full head of steam. She wondered if the travesty of a ceremony was ever going to end.

“... and so I now pronounce you men and wives,” the marrying officer finally finished. Ushers hastily escorted the couples and their attendants to a vestry, where the record books were signed, while another group of brides, grooms and attendants, came forward to be joined in wedlock.

Ceremony, Lynne thought, by courtesy only. Travesty would have been a far more accurate term. She glanced at Rolf again as he signed his name with a flourish in the book, wondering what her wedding would be like--if she ever married. At the moment, the idea was thoroughly repugnant to her.

“Come on, vinral,” said Rolf, using the Martian term of endearment as he gathered her in with his huge left hand. “Sign here--and then over here, in this book. Crehut, I thought old Bretinslov would never finish that blah-blah of his.”

Signing dutifully, Lynne said, “That blah-blah, as you call it, legalizes the serious vows of a marriage ceremony.” It seemed a little incredible to her that she should find herself defending a ritual which she had decried mentally only moments before. But Rolf’s attitude somehow infuriated her.

Rolf, whose eyes seemed pinker and foggier than usual, ran his tongue between his teeth and said, “Come on, vinral, my mouth is drier than desert dust. Let’s get over to the reception room and kiss the brides and get a drink. They’re serving some of the new champagne-lichenwasser the bio lab has synthesized, to its everlasting credit and glory.”

Lynne, unable to adjust herself to the recklessly riotous spirit of Mars on a binge, said, “Rolf, dear, don’t you think you’ve had enough? After all, there’s a limit to--”

“Enough?” Rolf interrupted her, with an incredulous grimace. “Lynne, this party’s just getting started. After we see off the brides, we’re going to settle down to some real drinking.” So saying, he pinched her, hard, where men have pinched women since time immemorial.

To her horror, she found herself on the verge of tears. She was glad she could cover her weakness by struggling with an outward display of assurance into the aluminum-fabric coverall that was uniform protection against the chill Martian outdoors, and the oxy-respirator worn for occasional revivifying whiffs against the thinness of the atmosphere.

She sat on somebody’s lap, securely wedged with the others into a land-runner for the half-kilometer trip to the reception hall. Around her, Rolf and the rest, joined in the rousing, ribald first chorus of The Farmer’s Martian Daughter, making her head ring with a volume of sound which was almost unbearable inside such a confined space. At that moment, she hated them all.

Nor was her dislike merely a matter of personal pique. She had felt the malaise for some time, felt it so gradually, so far below the level of her conscious mind, that she had been unaware of its creeping progress. Like the ping of an antique radar, a subconscious thought from the mind of her twin, Revere Fenlay, registered. He was thinking of his bride, Lao Mei-O’Connell, and his thought ran, I’m glad she’s going to be away from Mars for the next ten months. There’s bound to be trouble and I don’t want her in danger--especially while she’s carrying our child.

Lynne stifled an impulse to probe Revere’s mind with a telepathic inquiry as to the nature of the danger. She decided there would be time for that after Lao Fenlay and the other brides of the season were safely on their way to the home planet. But with awareness of Revere’s awareness, Lynne realized that some of her unhappiness was rooted not in homesickness but in unaccepted telepathic fears of her own--fears whose nature she could not pin down.

She probed Rolf’s mind carelessly and received a wholeheartedly carnal picture of Rolf and herself that caused her to drop that line of inquiry instantly. She was not in the mood for--what did he call it?--such ferkab canoodling. At the moment she hated the man--and not the least of her hatred’s causes lay in the very inevitability of her ultimate surrender to him. The marlet.

Watch your language, you ZWIRCHY VINRAL, came his answering thought. Lynne sealed her mind as tightly as her lips the rest of the way to the reception hall.

Here, beneath a girdered ceiling adorned with the stunted evergreens grown by Earthmen on Mars, a table had been set up for the marriage parties of each city, according to tradition. Accustomed to the fabricated foods of Earth, Lynne was astonished at the lavish display of barbecued boar, Marsapples and other delicacies, including plump forty-pound capon-turkeys, the pride of the husbandry labs.